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Forestry LC 173

K64

PART I.-ARTS AND SCIENCES

Chapter I. Introduction

Much of the general pessimism about the present function and the future destiny of arts and sciences in American education centers about conceptions of the college of arts and sciences as a unit of institutional organization. Agitated discussion of the topic has quite frequently forced into the background the more important matter of the functions in higher education of the areas of learning that are included in the vague term arts and sciences. This review is concerned both with arts and sciences as a unit in land-grant institutional organization and with the functions of the arts and science subjects in attaining the objectives of other forms of land-grant college education. Consideration of these two aspects of arts and sciences in the land-grant institutions may be clarified by a preliminary summary and definition of various conceptions of arts and science education.

It is possible to segregate four points of view: First, arts and sciences is thought of as a unit of institutional organization that includes a body of knowledge designed to provide four years of general higher education; second, arts and science education is thought of in terms of a 2-year junior college unit designed to provide and in a sense to complete general education preliminary to but not necessarily as preparation for vocational or scholarly specialization. This conception differs little from the first except in the length of the period allowed for completion of the process; third, arts and sciences is thought of as a unit in which are assembled for administrative purposes a variety of humanistic, social, and scientific subjects intended to serve the needs of the technical and professional schools and colleges; fourth, arts and sciences is thought of as a unit offering four or more years of preparation for a series of its own specialized vocations. These vocations include those of research or other creative activity in the fields of the several arts or in one or another field of the social or physical sciences.

In the land-grant institutions all these points of view are represented, as in other types of institution, by varying degrees of admixture and confusion. However, the whole arts and science problem is especially interesting and important in a study of the land-grant institutions because of the large influence that they have exercised in creating the complex and embarrassing situation in which arts and sciences now so generally finds itself. The four conceptions of arts and science education already named provide data points for review of the part that land-grant institutions have played in the creation of the college of arts and sciences and in the present confusion of its objectives.

When the Morrill Act was passed in 1862 there was in the United States no college that could properly be called a college of arts and sciences. There were approximately 200 higher educational institutions offering classical courses leading to the A. B. degree but sciences had not yet become a respectable and an accepted part of the body of knowledge that went into the making of an educated man. It is true that science courses were offered and encouraged at several of the older universities but they were generally of the lecture and textbook type with no laboratory requirements. Admission to college was upon the basis of examinations in Latin, Greek, English grammar, geography, mathematics, and sometimes history. In the universities there were practically no professional schools even for the older professions. Law, medicine, and the ministry were "read" with a master already established in the profession. College catalogues had remained practically unchanged in content for years.

It was one of the purposes of the first Morrill Act to set up beside and in contrast with these classical institutions another type of higher education which should emphasize the sciences and their practical application. Mr. Morrill did not believe that these institutions would interfere with the existing literary colleges. He said in 1857, "We need a careful, exact, and systematized registration of experiments such as can be made at thoroughly scientific institutions and such as will not be made elsewhere."

By 1872 one-half of the present land-grant institutions were established, and by 1893 every State then in the Union had a land-grant institution. During this period the agricultural experiment stations were established and the land-grant institutions developed the sciences with special reference to their practical application in agriculture and the mechanic arts. In the conflicts that waged between the scientists and the classicists and between science and religion land-grant college leaders took a vigorous part and the institutions championed and were strongholds for scientific investigation and thought. To them alone can not be attributed the

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